COH 2 was a rush job because THQ was going out of business and they had no time to create special rules, it had nothing to do with learning "lessons" from COH 1. At the same time Brian Wood the Lead Designer of COH 1 (and one of the reasons why previous Relic Titles were awesome like Dawn of War series) died as well so they did not have his expertise on top of the bankrupty and did a quick slapped together/makeshift job when the game launched. It took years of fixes before COH 2 was even playable, hell the game had peer to peer networking for quite some time when it launched and lagged like hell. It was Dawn of War 3 level of bad but they fixed it for the most part over time.
Brian Wood wasn't the lead designer of CoH1. He started working on the game during the development of opposing fronts (not 100% certian on this but he definitely wasn't lead designer for vCoH) and was lead designer of ToW and CoH both of which have nothing to do with target tables. Brian Wood also doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the Dawn of War titles. Are you just making shit up that sounds halfway believable?